I have a rather strange problem. Yesterday I created a file in Illustrator to try out some fonts for a logo I'm designing. For one piece of text I used the font "Kai Regular" and converted it to outlines. I made a note of the font, saved the file, and closed it down. Today I have gone back into Illustrator to continue my work, only to find that Kai Regular is no longer in my font list. I have just checked the font book on my computer, Kai Regular is there, but is showing as a chinese script. So, I checked the internet, and yes, Kai Regular is indeed a simplified chinese font. But the font I used yesterday that was called "Kai Regular" was a very attractive serif font! I have gone through all the other serif fonts in the list, just in case I had made a mistake with the name, but there are no other fonts that match the one I have saved. Unfortunately, because the work I saved yesterday was converted to outlines, I have no way of making sure of what it really was.

I guess I have 3 major questions:

a) Why is a font that was showing in my font list yesterday not there today?

b) Why did this font appear as a completely different letter set to what it is supposed to be?

c) If there are no other serif fonts in the font list that match the original text, then what did I use?

Can anybody help me, please?

I am using CS5.1 which I installed only a couple of months ago, on OS X 10.6.8

It sounds as if they are corrupt and mislabeling fonts in your apps. That probably won't help with finding the mislabeled font that you selected the previous day though. Open in preview to see the .pdf portion of the file - maybe it's still there for you to reference/screenshot.